Why didn’t I just go to bed???  Why?!

You ever do something really stupid?  And by “really stupid,” I don’t necessarily mean something akin to locking your keys in your car or forgetting to take out the trash the night before garbage day and having to deal with it being all stinky until the following week.  No, in my book those are all relatively harmless, albeit stupid mistakes in that while technically inconvenient, they still aren’t to the scale where you need to worry about them invoking nightmares that will haunt your dreams for the next week and a half.

Well, maybe if you just had sushi for dinner the night before and there was that disgusting scent of day-old, raw fish lingering that desperately needed to go out, but I think I would still argue that frankly, mine’s much, much worse…

Worse because if there’s one thing that I’ve learned about myself over the last thirty years of, well, being me, it’s that when it comes to horror movies, or scary movies, or even movies that just have vaguely startling scenes in their theatrical trailers, I’m a big, fat, gigantic wuss. This is by no means a new thing – at this point, I really should know better and thus because of this, I kind of have to accept the fact that I basically deserve whatever psychological and mental traumas I have coming to me if I actually sit through an entire movie that for all tends and purposes, no amount of bribery or sexual persuasion should ever be able to even get me in the chair for in the first place!

So anyways, as the story goes, I was up pretty late … as in, so late that I was well past the point where the brain still uses actual logic to decide what to watch on TV.  Through some sort of divine wrath, somehow the clicker landed on Cinemax, which as you may have heard isn’t exactly known for the most “mainstream” of programming that television has to offer!  However in this case, it was so late that we were surprisingly even past the boobs, buns, and babe-on-babe portion of the night to the point where it was clear that they were really just passing time until dawn, and it was during those wee hours when I found myself taking in a quaint, little tale about the trials and tribulations of a small town in Texas, titled appropriately enough, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Correction: I suppose that technically it was the prequel to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, although this was one time where I would’ve been tickled pink to see Jar-Jar Binks pop his head out from behind a bale of hay and bring a bit of comedic, albeit ridiculous relief to my movie-watching experience!

Now I know, I should’ve stopped right there – there’s really no conceivable reason why yours truly would ever sit through such a frightening, bone-chilling monstrosity, but I did it anyways … I don’t know why I did it … I guess maybe it was just because I’m an idiot. Every moment of suspense, every chase through a dark, wooded area, and not to spoil it for anyone, but even the scene where that crazy dude chops his very first victims to pieces with a chainsaw … predictable, I know, and yet there I sat absolutely petrified with fear, unable to look away for the entire excruciating 91 minutes … you might say I can’t believe I watched the whole thing!

Of course, with any luck, “I can’t believe I slept the whole night!” will be soon to follow, but with images so disgustingly brutal that I’d have to rate this column M for Mature still all too vivid in my head, something tells me that visions of dancing sugarplums and the rainbows and unicorns that usually adorn my dreams will be on hiatus at least for the immediate future.  Hey, they’re not stupid – unicorns and chainsaws just don’t mix – I suppose that at this point all we can hope for is that someday I’ll truly realize that, well, chainsaws and Scotts don’t mix, either.

If there’s but one thing that to be learned from this hair-raising, slumber-ruining experience, it’s simply this – just remember that at four o’clock in the morning, no one can hear you scream … but if by some miracle they still do, they’re really not going to be very eager to comfort you after your incessant, fear-induced sobbing wakes them up in the middle of the night.

Just go to bed, folks!

Friends don’t let friends watch terrifying prequels to horror movies about crazy people who run around chopping people to bits with chainsaws, no matter how quaint and easy-going the family seems at the beginning of the story.  You’ll thank me in the morning, and if your nerves are anything like mine, in many subsequent mornings to come, too…

Just. Go. To. Bed…